The descent of Oberlin College, a once-prestigious haven for serious  immersion in the liberal arts, into the madness of political correctness has reached the point where grown ups have to intervene. The chairman of the Oberlin College Board of Trustees has reacted to the pusillanimous response of the college’s president to naked anti-Semitism on the part of a professor at that institution.  (see Michael Curtis’s account here).

The Tower.org reports:

Clyde McGregor, Chair of Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees issued the following statement Saturday with regard to the social media postings of Assistant Professor Joy Karega.

At our quarterly Board meeting yesterday, the Trustees of Oberlin College discussed postings on social media by an Oberlin faculty member.

These postings are anti-Semitic and abhorrent. We deplore anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry. They have no place at Oberlin.

These grave issues must be considered expeditiously. In consultation with President Marvin Krislov, the Board has asked the administration and faculty to challenge the assertion that there is any justification for these repugnant postings and to report back to the Board.

From its founding, Oberlin College has stood for inclusion, respect, and tolerance. We still do.

McGregor’s statement, which does not cite Karega by name, refers to a series of posts on Facebook and Twitter, first reported by TheTower.org on February 25, in which Karega claims, among other things, that a banker named Rothschild secretly owns most of the world’s central banks, that Israel was behind ISIS and the terror attacks of 9/11 and Paris, and that Hurricane Sandy was deliberately engineered as a form of “weaponized” weather.

Colleges and universities across America (and much of the Western world) have been squandering their integrity and standards on the alter of political correctness, tolerating abuses of freedom of speech, recruiting poorly qualified faculty espousing lunatic theories, lowering standards for designated groups, ignoring the fundamental building blocks of our civilization of the classical liberal arts, and tolerating all sorts of laziness, emotional hysteria, and misbehavior. The professoriate and the administrators are incapable of self-correction, for the internal mechanisms of power and prestige in the non-STEM disciplines have been seized by the left.

A group with which I have long been affiliated, ACTA (The American Council of Trustees and Alumni), has long argued that trustees have a fiduciary duty that extends far beyond finances, and must act as backstops to keep higher education focused on its mission of serving the public, not just the passions and interests of academics.  Mr. McGregor is serving as a role model for this moral fiduciary function.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, and also a law professor at the University of Tennessee, has long been developing the notion of a higher education bubble – that the over-valuation of higher education, combined with the rise of tuition at roughly three times the rate of inflation for half a century, will inevitably result on a crash that will leave many institutions defunct.

Craven surrender to political correctness only hastens the popping of the bubble.  The University of Missouri finally managed to fire Melissa (“I need some muscle”) Click when applications and alumni donations took a nosedive in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations there. I suspect that Oberlin has also seen some declines in the wake of multiple cave-ins to PC.

It is time the grown-ups, the trustees, take control of higher education throughout the country.  ACTA is dong God’s work.